MACS

Let's go back to the beginnings of the computer era, to the first electronic gaming devices and home computers...

We write the year 1986. A teenage 15-year-old in a small village in the Münsterland/NRW visits his adult neighbor, who told him something about computers and games. This boy had already made his first electronic experiences with a new device, because since a short time he was the proud owner of an Atari VCS 2600 game console and some plug-in modules. "The Empire strikes back" from the Star Wars series was his favorite pixel adventure.
Arriving at his neighbor's house, he proudly showed him his machine, a first generation C64 with numerous expansions, heads and switches, buzzing drives and mountains of floppy disks. This neighbor, a Mr. Andresen, lived just like the teenager in the tranquil town of Freckenhorst, a district of Warendorf in Westphalia.

So a C64 was purchased, still without drives and software, and the first listings were tried out. Quickly it was clear; a drive was needed. But it should still last, because a move was pending. In 1987, I moved from the tranquil Münsterland to the pulsating Rhine-Main area in Hesse and to my new home in Karben in the Wetterau district. Here, a 1541 was purchased and soon expanded with a Speeddos Plus. In the new (first) school, one got to know some like-minded people, especially the neighbors Hans-Jürgen (Hansi) and his brother, who owned a 128. With them, one founded "Elite Cracking Service" on a whim and made first (rather embarrassing) coding attempts.

After another change of school in Karben they met Andi (Gobo) and Thomy (Sid, at that time still Jason). Besides the exchange of various games they discovered similarities and especially the coding talent of Andi brought the idea of a group further forward. Andi and the brother Markus (Maggo) had already founded "Powerzone" some time ago and created one or the other tool. But they lacked contacts in the scene and ideas for further projects, which André (Macs) brought along. He invited the two to become a part of ECS with Powerzone and to crack games, especially to code cool intros.

In the end, due to the lack of originals, no games worth mentioning were ever cracked and ECS was finally dropped in order to devote themselves entirely to the beloved demos with Powerzone. After a few releases in 1989 and 1990 and an intensive contact to Digital Marketing, they were able to commercialize and develop the tool "Final Designer" to DM in the middle of 1990. Much of this was the initiative of André: The contact to Dieter Mückter/DM, the design of the tool, organizing meetings to code and develop, writing and layouting the manual, contract management and accounting of sales and requests.

André was an early organizational talent and thus kept the group together, made sure there were regular meetings, motivated everyone to work on projects and maintained contacts in the scene. A move in 1990 to Bruchköbel, about 18 km away, made regular meetings more difficult for the time being. Nevertheless André always found solutions for this. When he finally got his driver's license in the same year and had a car at his disposal, it was possible to meet more often again and to visit numerous copyparties, which were also further away.

Due to private and school/professional changes the contact to the friends slowly broke off and Powerzone fell asleep. André's activities in the C64 scene also fell asleep, as he increasingly developed more on the PC.

In the following years André was very active in the media sector. Besides studying history in Marburg, he was the editor of a well-known game fanzine and then became a production manager in a film production company. After that he founded a media production company and worked for many years in the games industry on titles such as Spellforce - The Order of Dawn, Anno 1701 and many other games. For family reasons, however, he eventually turned his back on the media industry.

Today André lives in Hirzenhain (Wetteraukreis/Hessen), is a self-employed web designer and runs a professional apiary with his wife in parallel.

 

CREDITS